The need to further one’s career tends to inculcate a spirit of wanderlust amongst employees. ‘Where do you see yourself x years from now?’ is a real concern for many employees. Inadequate answers to this question can often cause an employee to seriously re-evaluate his role within the organization and many a times contribute to his quitting the organization. Industry surveys indicate that employees quit because of immediate managers, mismatch in career aspirations and job dissatisfaction.

At Torry Harris, we follow a well-researched Competency Model (CM) that helps us identify and evaluate gaps and necessary steps to bridge it. Each employee, while reporting to a project manager, also has a designated Competency Manager who continuously maps the employee’s performance/growth and facilitates a feedback mechanism that leads to better understanding of the employee’s career aspirations, while aligning them to the organizational goals.

The CM works on the principle that the employee growth evaluation is based on two aspects - competency level and service delivery potential. We place these two aspects on a grid as illustrated in the diagrammatic representation, with delivery on one axis - dealing in customer expectations in terms of quality and timelines, which is managed by the delivery manager and competency is mapped on another axis that deals with peoples’ expectation in career growth, work-life balance and technical growth managed by competency managers. As pressure builds up at the delivery level, it creates an impact on the individuals’ competency and ultimately delivery may suffer. Hence, by forming a team of competency managers, we want to create a comfort zone for employees. A few months ago, we came across one such case.

On regular monitoring of performance of an employee, the competency manager anticipated a possible dip in performance levels. On further probing and extensive interaction with the employee, a gap was noticed between the career aspiration of the employee and the current role he was performing. The employee possessed good front-end skills and would have been an asset at the client location. On discussing this renewed role with the employee, he was very enthusiastic about taking on this challenge. Hence the transition of this employee from his current role to his front-end role was facilitated and today, it is a win-win situation for all the stakeholders - the client is extremely happy, the employee has excelled in his new role and is very happy with his job and the organization is very satisfied with the way the entire situation has shaped up.

The idea is to satisfy all the stakeholders and create a comfortable environment for the customer and for the employee and in this context, our CM ensures that everybody wins.

Ashwin Krishna COO, Torry Harris Business Solutions